The coronavirus pandemic is seemingly rendering nations and economies on hold. This is as governments try to figure out the best steps to go about this. Meanwhile, it seems that adult entertainment sites are finding ways to cash in on this global health disaster. According to their recently released data, their various marketing schemes over the last couple of weeks seem to be working a lot to their favour.

In the past 4 weeks alone, there has been a total of 6,877,922 searches about coronavirus on Pornhub. This hunger for COVID-19 related porn seems to have peaked on March 5th with over 1.5 million searches in a day. According to Pornhub, viewers in countries like Slovakia, Bulgaria, Malaysia, Ireland and Serbia are really into viral porn.

We may not know whether it is because of the various states of emergency issued but the content seems to be going viral even where it’s not supposed to.

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The viral search, however, is not unique to just Pornhub as other sites are reaping the good harvest as well. Rival adult content site xHamster saw a similar upward trend in the same period around March 7th, according to data shared with The Next Web. But even though the site couldn’t share the specifics, it is clear by now that all these sites are up to make profit.

Image courtesy The Next Web

This spike though isn’t one you would call a miracle as these companies have been working on it for a while. There have been a lot of videos lately on the sites related to coronavirus. This even includes others titled as so with nothing to do with the pandemic. Currently, there are over 320 videos on Pornhub and another 13 on xHamster.

Viral Marketing

But even then, sites like Pornhub have been on the move promoting their premium content to affected countries. Last week, the company made waves after giving Italians free premium subscriptions for the entire month of March to keep them from breaking quarantine. The only catch was that you had to open a new account with the site.

Apparently, Pornhub wasn’t even the first to jump on the chance as xHamster ran a similar campaign at the end of February. This is to the point of the site receiving a surge that prompted them to halt the registration of any new users.

While this may be spiking specifically in specific countries and regions, one can imagine how busy these companies will get if the virus continues to spread further than it already has (hopefully not).